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FALSE INTERPRETATIONS OF FASCISM AND THE TRUE...
mardi 24 juin 2025, par ,
FALSE INTERPRETATIONS OF FASCISM AND THE TRUE ONE
0°) There is a mistaken tendency to consider a social and political phenomenon like fascism as one wrongly considers a physical phenomenon, that is to say as an inert object, without dynamics, without dialectics of opposites, without brutal change, in short as an inert thing that can only break but not really transform itself or transform the world. Fascism is not a thing but an emerging and dynamic phenomenon that cannot be fought simply by saying that one is against it but by developing another real dynamic. Fascism cannot exist (the formation of a mass of revolted, impoverished and militarized people under the rule of the fascists crushing the proletariat) without the dynamics capable of being extraordinarily agitated and carrying potential radical changes of the class struggle, just as the cloud cannot exist (tons of water would not stay in the air) without the dynamics capable of being extraordinarily agitated and carrying potential radical changes of molecular agitation and the atom (and even the material particle) cannot exist (a sum of positive particles that repel each other remaining stuck) cannot exist without the dynamics capable of being extraordinarily agitated and carrying potential radical changes of the quantum vacuum. The fixed vision without dynamics and dialectics does not allow to fight fascism.
1°) And this is not just a speech. Fascism is not a current of opinion (the establishment of a fascist power is not a decision of public opinion and one does not fight fascism simply by fighting ideas, prejudices, lies) : it is a type of state power that is the product of an extreme situation, completely destabilized for the exploiting class. It must above all not be separated from the class struggle. Fascism is the product of a struggle between classes that has reached an ultimate stage where the only alternative is social revolution or fascist counter-revolution.
2) This particular type of State (which is not a simple dictatorship) comes from the fact that in addition to the classic forces of repression (notably the army and police or even State militias), it temporarily associates an organized movement of masses called the "fascist troops" and taken from the middle classes and popular circles.
3°) This particular situation concerns the three essential social classes of any society : exploiting class, middle class and exploited class. What characterizes this critical state of the social and political order is the fact that there is a risk that the exploited class will unite with the middle class (or a notable fraction of it) to establish a revolutionary power. It is this threatening social risk which justifies in the eyes of the exploiting class to put forward (temporarily) a violent fraction of the middle class and also of the popular or impoverished classes, those who will be called "the fascists", to organize them and to throw them into violent action.
4) One of the risks of political and social error consists in taking these "fascist troops" for a real social force, for a real weapon of war when it is only a band without faith or law but also without real goal or political or social perspective of its own. These troops only defend the interests of the big exploiters but are not aware of it. The ruling class only uses them but it distrusts them and will dissolve them as soon as the real revolutionary danger, that of the exploited and their capacity by taking the lead of all the oppressed to overthrow the state power of the exploiters, is eradicated. The real answer to fascism consists in uniting in a revolutionary way the exploited with the oppressed of the middle class and other popular layers, in order to constitute a force capable of overthrowing the ruling class. This is only possible if the exploited class self-organizes and develops its own perspectives by demonstrating that it wants to overthrow the exploiting class and reaches out to other oppressed people, especially those in the middle classes.
5) If we want to understand fascism, the first point is not to focus on the sole example of Nazism in Germany or fascism in Italy. Not only are there many other examples, but we risk believing that the specific characteristics of these particular fascisms would be general. For example, there is no need for a fascist power to be anti-Semitic. Nor to practice genocide of the Jews. Even racism is not an indispensable characteristic. Fascism is not a European movement, nor specifically linked to the imperialist phase of big capital (Karl Marx recognized this in France with the Bonapartist movement of Louis Bonaparte, who would become Napoleon III), nor even to the era of capitalism (we have seen it in pre-capitalist bourgeois societies and in slave societies like the Roman Empire).
6°) There is another classic error in the interpretation of fascism that the "anti-fascist democrats", or those who claim to be, particularly like to develop as a deception, and which consists of attributing the fascist character only to the political and social movements of the extreme right, which would clear the center and the left of any risk of being elements favorable, at a given moment, to the fascist rise. In fact, when there is a fascist rise, this occurs with the complicity at multiple levels of all the parties, unions and associations linked to the State of the exploiters and their social and political order, notably the entire left and all the reformists and opportunists (up to the false extreme left). Fascist leaders can perfectly well come from the left (like Mussolini or Laval), or be supported by it (like that of Pétain supported by most of the political and union leaders of the Popular Front in France). Those who bind the feet and hand of the exploited class are above all elements of the left.
7) The decision to adopt fascism should not be attributed to any particular populist, demagogic, so-called genius or mad leader. The choice of fascism should not be attributed solely to the decision of a political apparatus (of the State or of a party). It is the choice of an exploiting social class (in our time, of capitalism and of the fraction of big capital). Fascism develops in a country’s situation, but it does so on the basis of a decision that is not specific to the country but to the capitalist class as a whole.
8°) Whatever the various circumstances of its advent, fascism is always a brutal, violent, bloody, terrorist and totally destructive attack against everything that represents an organized, conscious (even very partially, even in a reformist and democratic manner) fraction of the exploited. The capitalist class must absolutely annihilate all class feeling and transform the exploited capable of making the revolution into obedient, frightened and groveling slaves.
9) Ideologically, fascism does not necessarily have a relationship with anti-Semitism or even racism, but it always has a relationship with extreme and violent nationalism, hatred of other peoples, the attraction to war against other peoples, hatred of internationalism. And here too, it is not a question of ideology outside of classes : what fascism hates is the international character of the revolutionary proletariat and the perspective of society that it carries.
10°) Fascism has mass popular support, but this popular movement does not have the character of a revolution, not only because its goals are counter-revolutionary and are charged with saving the ruling and possessing class from social revolution, but above all because this movement has no autonomous social and political force. These masses of fascist people are not a real force. They do not even know the role they play, and as soon as they have annihilated the proletariat, they are sent back to the nothingness of their non-existence, disarmed and disorganized, to make way for the classical state dictatorship. These fascist masses have no social and political perspective of their own. All they can do is proclaim their love of nationalism at a time when respect for nations no longer has any meaning.
11°) Moralism has no power against fascism. If we consider it only as a moral evil, we cannot fight fascism. Anti-fascist moralism is a kind of pacifism that disarms the proletarians and only serves the fascists. Moralism denounces but does not fight ; it refuses to fight in the name of... morality !
12°) There is no particular program to combat fascism, nor one to combat war, nor one for the economic struggle, there is a single program that aims at the international proletarian socialist revolution. The worst thing is to believe that in the face of the fascist threat, we must abandon the social revolution and be content to… fight against fascism, to better unite, to better hinder it, to better isolate it, to ensure the future. This is to abandon the boat because there is a flood…
ANYONE WHO BACKS AWAY FROM THE TASK OF BUILDING COUNCILS OF THE WORKING PEOPLE AND GIVING THEM TOTAL POWER IS UNFIT TO FIGHT FASCISM
A new Nazism appears with the new collapse of capitalism. Economic and social decay brings back the rottenness of governments...
Never again, they said after Hitler ! Never again the systematic elimination of a people ! Never again a wandering people driven from their land and condemned to walk, walk to escape the horror, the mass violence under the pretext of ethnicity ! Never again a "final solution" aimed at eradicating an entire population for racial, religious or national reasons ! Never again the systematic suffocation of a population, with massive bombings, directly targeting civilians, collectively eliminating their homes, their schools, their hospitals, their streets, their food, their water supplies, their medicines, their roads and means of transport, their means of communication, their electricity, their energy, etc. Never again a people locked in a ghetto that is then eliminated by diseases, repression and bombings ! Never again bloody and massive exactions targeting non-combatant populations, men, women, children, old people ! No more extrajudicial atrocities that kill non-combatants, including international aid workers and journalists ! No more horrific acts of war without any control over the country’s state ! No more demands for absolute rights from a supposedly superior population, a supposedly chosen people, a people who have an indisputable need for a space to dominate by attacking neighboring peoples, by waging war on all bordering countries !
No water ! No bread ! No medicine ! No homes ! No hospitals ! No health ! No security ! No peace ! No mercy, not even for civilians, for women and children ! No zone without bombing, without systematic demolition of homes, without violent expulsions !
Yes, to all these characteristics, we must add the one, essential to the qualification of fascism, of the elimination within one’s own country, among one’s own people, of any proletarian or popular and democratic organization ! This is what allows us to define the new Nazism that we see flourishing, that of Israel in Gaza and throughout the region (in Israel itself, in the West Bank, in Lebanon, in Yemen, etc.) and which is unmistakably similar to that of Hitler !
Hitler’s "final solution" and Netanyahu’s "total elimination" don’t only have similarities ! They have common foundations... Both are practiced by radical far-right regimes. Both take place following a threat of challenging the regime and the system following a historic collapse of the local and global system. Both follow the global economic, social, and political collapse and the threat of a resurgence of political protest by the local population, attacking the regime. Both follow a historic and global economic collapse (in 1929 as in 2007). Both occur in a country where the ruling class is at the end of its rope, interested in pushing for the generalization of war across an entire region and even the entire world. Both originate from regimes claiming the need for "living space for a people," justifying the colonization of neighboring regions. Both claim a very ancient historical presence of an enslaved people (the Slavs and the Hebrews) occupying vast territories for a very long time.
Comparing Hitler to Netanyahu, isn’t that forgetting that Jews living in Israel were victims of Nazism ? On the contrary, former death camp deportees living in Israel have been protesting in the streets, denouncing the fascism of Israeli leaders is precisely remembering the crime of German fascism and refusing to commit or justify it again.
Is it possible to call an Israeli leader a criminal without being called an anti-Semite ? As if the state’s leaders only had the security of the Israeli people as their goal in terrorizing the Palestinians ! Even if Hamas is most certainly a terrorist organization, this only further condemns the Israeli leaders because they are the ones who favored the rise of Hamas, not only to divide the Palestinians but above all to oppose the Palestinian revolution that was then rising by opposing it with the fascist far-right Hamas. And Hamas’s latest offensive did not surprise the Israeli authorities as they claim : they were aware of it and let it happen to justify their own offensive later...
Can’t we say that Netanyahu is a murderer ? But he’s the statesman who managed to achieve the record number of deaths per day in the world, isn’t that enough ? And he’s very far from having the support of his entire population to commit such crimes ! The Israelis are not the last to condemn him, to call him a fascist and a murderer and to take to the streets to bring him down !
It is a criminal who kills Gaza day after day, week after week, month after month. Yes indeed ! Gaza is massively destroyed homes, populations herded into death camps, a people being systematically and collectively strangled, to eliminate them, it is an openly organized collective elimination. And this policy of collective elimination, of generalizing war to an entire region was not only supported by Biden and Trump, but acclaimed by most of the American Congress when Netanyahu presented it as "America’s war" ! Western "democracies" are no more embarrassed than in Hitler’s time and no more support a fight against fascism and war !
It is not only in Israel and the Middle East that Netanyahu is in the camp of fascism : he supports the anti-Semitic fascist Orban in Hungary, the American fascist Trump, the fascist Bolsonaro, the anti-Semitic Saudi leaders, the new anti-Semitic Syrian terrorist leaders, etc.
Anyone who refuses to denounce Netanyahu under the pretext that he is a leader of the State of Israel condemns himself to condoning all the other fascist crimes committed in the world !
The far-right Jewish fascist movement does not originate today, but rather from a certain Jabotinsky, a Zionist terrorist leader who operated before and after the birth of Israel, whom Israeli leaders themselves called a fascist and who made no secret of supporting Mussolini. Netanyahu’s father was none other than Jabotinsky’s secretary, a terrorist fanatic in the Zionist movement ! Netanyahu’s son is a white supremacist. And Netanyahu himself is openly racist and fascist, like the entire political movement he leads, for which he is the epitome of corruption and state violence. Being Jewish does not prohibit one from being a Nazi. There is no nationality, ethnicity, or religion that is inherently non-fascist, not Israelis any more than anyone else. The elimination of European Jews by Nazism does not make all Jews inherently anti-fascists. The State of Israel is not an anti-fascist state and never has been.
Netanyahu and his associates and allies around the world honor as “friends of Israel” and “strategic allies” of the Jewish state such outspoken racists and anti-Semites as the rulers of Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, Italy, Argentina, and US President Donald Trump, as well as European right-wing extremists Salvini, Wilders, and Dewinter, as well as American Evangelicals and so many other violent fascists.
Today, with the crimes of Gaza, Ukraine, Yemen, Africa, Syria, it is the entire capitalist world that is falling into the fascist horror desired by the possessing classes as at the time of the economic and social collapse (in 1929) and from 1933 (coming to power of Nazism) until the Second World War in 1939. It is the entire world that considered itself threatened by the social revolution (the wave of revolts that began in 2010-2011) as in the 1930s and thus justified the necessity for the possessing classes of the march towards fascism and barbarism.
In Gaza, as in the West Bank, as in Israel, as in the entire Middle East, the question is not to choose the lesser of two worst between Hamas and Netanyahu, between the Israelis and the Palestinians. We do not have to choose between peoples, and there is no point in choosing the leaders of capitalist states : we must overthrow them through social revolution. If we do not do this, we will pay for it with the barbarity we see today in Gaza and tomorrow throughout the world. If we condone the crimes of the serial killer Netanyahu, we also condone them on the part of Hamas and all the fascists in the world.
The real choice is between the global destruction of all peoples by a dying capitalism that wants to bury us with it rather than lose power and the resumption of the march of the proletarian socialist revolution leading to power for the workers.
The choice is not between Hamas and the State of Israel, or their ilk around the world, but between the bloody dictatorship of big capital and the seizure of power by workers’ councils, those famous soviets of the working people which, in 1917-1923, made the capitalist world tremble without managing to bring it down.
In Palestine, as elsewhere, there will be no peaceful solution, no democratic solution, no progressive solution, no "left" solution that will allow us to avoid fascism, dictatorship, war, including world and thermonuclear war, which is not a solution through the self-organized revolution of the exploited masses united within their mass organizations, the soviets.
In Israel-Palestine-Lebanon-Egypt, as everywhere else in the world, there is no government, no political party, no military, union, or political leader to support. Only the exploited, making their own decisions, offer a perspective for the future. They must resume the course of the revolutionary wave that began in 2010-2011 following the global economic collapse of 2007-2008.
Gaza is not just another crime, it is a signal that the choice for the working people must be made urgently : death camps and mass capitalist terror or Soviet socialism !